Film and TV

How LAIKA made waves with Kubo and the Two Strings

Overcoming the challenges of style vs realism

When Eric Wachtman first saw the script for Kubo and the Two Strings, he was slightly terrified. Even for LAIKA's experienced CG look development lead, the sheer scale of the challenge was overwhelming.

The opening shots of the stop-motion hybrid film depict a small boat at night, during a storm, in the middle of an ocean. How were the team going to make those highly stylised waves look like realistic water? How were they going to do it at that scale?

Eric explains how they overcame these challenges using Mari, Katana and Nuke - and in the process created out-of-the ordinary, Oscar-nominated visual effects.

Eric Wachtman, LAIKA

We do out-of-the-ordinary visual effects at Laika. We rely heavily on Foundry tools to give us the flexibility to hit the stylisation and the look and feel of the films.